September 30, 2005

We have had a great week on the Business Blog Book Tour with Darren Rovell.

I wanted to catch you up on the stops from the second half of the week. On Wednesday, we were at The Marketing Playbook. My favorite bit was assessing Gatorade through the MP framework:

Darren Rovell: In some ways this is a hard play to call. Internally, one of the things I admire is how much the Gatorade team acts like they are always in a life or death dragrace. They worry all the time about Powerade. They see them as the enemy and always want to make sure they are ahead. At the same time how can you really be in a dragrace when you have nearly "illegal" market share?

So in another way, they are acting like they are in a platform play, rising above the noise and continuing to grow the overall sports drink category.

Finally, at the same time, you could say they began by executing on a stealth strategy, focusing on an underserved, un-noticed subsegment of the market - non carbonated sports drinks and staying way under Coke's and others' radar for some time. Until now where the whole category of alternative, non carbonated beverages is a huge growth category of it's own - vitamin waters, bottled teas, and yeah, the giant business of bottled water. And yet somehow amidst all this Gatorade keeps growing.

Yesterday, we were at Slacker Manager. Bren goes through the very practical things like asking Darren what his favorite flavor is (just kidding). It is a great piece from another viewpoint.

Finally today we are The Personal MBA. I know it isn't technically a blog, but I thought it was be a great place to be talking about the book. They are already talking this morning about the book on their discussion boards.

Finally, I want to thank Darren for spending time with everybody this week. You can keep up with the Gatorade story at Darren's Gatorade Blog.